Being online today isn’t just about having a digital presence—it’s about making that presence accessible, efficient, and search-friendly. As users increasingly browse from mobile devices, it becomes critical that your website delivers both speed and clarity.
PrestaShop users know that staying relevant in this mobile-first era means more than responsive themes. It extends to the very URLs that structure your site’s navigation.
A well-structured URL offers more than just readability. It gives your users a smoother experience while significantly improving your chances of ranking well in search engine results.
That’s where friendly URLs come into play. Specifically for PrestaShop users, implementing prestashop friendly url settings is a foundational step toward building a mobile-first, SEO-optimized website.
In a world where over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, your URLs need to be clean, concise, and keyword-aware. This ensures ease of access for users and crawlers alike.
Friendly URLs eliminate confusing strings of characters that are difficult to understand and navigate—especially on smaller screens.
For example, compare these URLs:
Unfriendly: www.example.com/index.php?id_product=87&controller=product
Friendly: www.example.com/women-handbags
The difference in clarity is obvious. The latter is more readable and better communicates page intent, particularly to mobile users quickly browsing on the go.
With PrestaShop, setting up friendly URLs isn’t difficult, but it’s important to do it properly to avoid conflicts, broken links, or poor SEO signals.
Let’s walk through the practical steps to enable friendly URLs in PrestaShop and optimize them for better mobile and search performance.
Begin by accessing your PrestaShop admin dashboard. From here, navigate to the “Shop Parameters” section, and click on “Traffic & SEO.”
Under this tab, you’ll find the URL settings panel. Look for the “Set up URLs” section to proceed.
Here, you’ll see an option labeled “Friendly URL.” Toggle this to “Yes” to enable human-readable URLs for your store.
This will remove the unnecessary elements like query strings (?id=123) and controller references from the default URLs.
After enabling this setting, scroll down and save your changes. PrestaShop will automatically regenerate your URLs to match the clean format.
Next, you’ll need to enable Apache’s .htaccess file to ensure the changes are reflected on your site. Without it, your server may not handle the new URL structure properly.
Make sure “URL rewriting” is enabled on your server. This is usually turned on by default in most hosting environments but always worth confirming.
After adjusting the settings, you might want to regenerate the .htaccess file. This ensures your site handles the new structure without conflicts.
This change should immediately make your site’s URLs more digestible and search-friendly. However, your work doesn’t end here.
It’s important to audit your pages and look at each individual product or category URL. PrestaShop gives you the ability to edit each one manually, and it’s worth doing.
Make sure your slugs are keyword-rich, relevant to the content, and free from stop-words or unnecessary parameters.
For example, instead of “summer-collection-new-2025-fashion,” a better slug would be “summer-dresses-2025.” It’s cleaner and more direct for both users and search engines.
This is where the importance of the pretty url prestashop module can come in for some users. If your store has legacy URLs or complex naming conventions, a URL management plugin can help tidy things up.
Such tools automate the process of cleaning URLs and redirecting old ones, which is particularly helpful if you’ve been running your store for years and have many indexed links.
Once your URLs are updated, be sure to test them thoroughly. Navigate through your store on both desktop and mobile to verify that all links function properly and quickly.
Use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and PageSpeed Insights to ensure that changes haven’t affected loading times or broken any links.
Another overlooked aspect of URL optimization is multilingual support. If you’re running a multi-language store, each version of your URLs should reflect the correct language context.
PrestaShop lets you define URLs per language, and doing this manually ensures that international users get the most localized experience possible.
Besides making things mobile-friendly, Google’s mobile-first indexing demands URL simplicity. The clearer your URLs, the easier for bots to crawl and index your pages.
A complicated or broken URL can harm your site’s ranking, especially when viewed on mobile, where Google now prioritizes performance and usability.
With friendly URLs, you also reduce bounce rates. When users understand where a link is going, they’re more likely to click through and stay engaged.
Moreover, friendly URLs often perform better on social sharing platforms. Clean URLs are easier to copy, paste, and preview on mobile screens.
Remember to always create 301 redirects for your old URLs to the new ones. This preserves your SEO equity and ensures a smooth transition for returning users or search engine bots.
Lastly, keep tracking your traffic and bounce rate after making these changes. Any improvement here can often be traced back to better navigation and URL clarity.
As mobile usage continues to climb, implementing best practices like friendly URLs will remain a non-negotiable part of your SEO strategy.
Whether you’re managing a new PrestaShop store or optimizing an existing one, responsive design and well-structured URLs must go hand in hand.
A well-organized URL structure will not only improve SEO but also ensure your users find your store easy to use, no matter the device they’re on.
Take these steps seriously, and you’ll build a faster, smarter, and more accessible online presence.
